Puttin' Your Shine on It!

In response to Radym's question of how to "bring your whole self" into something and encourage others to do so:

One of the more useful phrases i've head on that, and this comes from a Alicia Garza, a young black female leader at a group called POWER, is "put your shine on it" - whatever it is that you're doing, put your unique shine on it. Don't just do it efficiently, do it the way that puts your flair into it.

Here are some examples, both coincidentally about fundraising:

• At my job at EBASE, which is a progressive left pro-working people multi-racial non-profit organization , I was asked to take over leading the phone banking sessions. Coming into this job, I was trying to take a lot of clues on how I was supposed to act, how to dress, how to be "professional." The office manager, a young black woman, was really enthusiastic and always celebrated people whenever something good happened, putting on the intercom and wildly shaking this hand clapper thing. AND she dressed well. This encouraged me to not just host a boring, "efficient" phonebanking where I gave people call lists and guided them on what to say, but I thought about, what would make this fun for me? I made playlists of music around themes of "money" or "phone calls" - really silly stuff, even just some general pump you up C + C Music Factory stuff - and blared the hell out if when it was phonebanking time - and danced people into the conference room. Then we played some silly games before we moved on to the call lists and spiels. If you know me, I'm all about fun music and dancing and this was how I "brought my whole self" into my 9-to-5 office job. And people LOVED it!!!!

• During our first weekend in the Braden program, we were told to close our eyes. Someone guided us through a meditation about being at the bottom of the sea, and i was like, where is this going??!! When we were told to open our eyes, there were three of our leaders dressed in glimmery mermaid costumes and wigs! Then they talked to us about how fundraising was going to be a part of the program. Throughout the program, whenever it was time to talk about fundraising, they pulled out the mermaid themes and created a glittery ocean board to post our experiences with fundraising. Sure they could have just passed out some papers with what we would be doing fundraising and given us a motivational speech. But they were all queer and loved sparkles and dressing up and mythical creatures and they sure as hell put their shine on fundraising!

So those are some examples - they are both ones abo. Key points to me are:

• Verbally encouraging it in the culture! Noticing when professionalism is reigning unnecessarily!
• When people do it in a small way, thanking them and encourage them to bring it out more!
• Recognizing people's particular flair or strong points or that they are a good emotional barometer or whatever.
• Leading by example! When one person starts "bringin' it" it makes it easier for everyone else. If something's really on your mind but you think it "shouldn't" - freakin say it because maybe it's on other people's minds too!

So those are some thoughts.